


Interim

by EndoplasmicPanda



Series: Endo's Oneshots [6]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Family Bonding, Fluff, Keith embarrasses himself, Krolia embarrasses her son, M/M, Season/Series 06 Spoilers, takes place during the time skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 06:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14949458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EndoplasmicPanda/pseuds/EndoplasmicPanda
Summary: She’s seen his face, seen the image burned into Keith’s memory, the man that haunts his past in all the right ways. She’s seen it draped down the sides of buildings on rebel planets, and plastered across wanted posters deep within the Galran Empire. But despite all that publicity, despite all the fame, Krolia knows nothing about the man that means everything to her son.(Takes place during the time skip of Season 6.)





	Interim

It’s not until the third week on their mission to the center of the quantum rift that Krolia works up the nerve to talk to her son.

It’s easy enough to talk about herself when Keith asks, easy enough to point out all the flaws in her logic and all her failures. She looks back at each one with a grim sort of humor, amused at the circumstances. But that was before. Before, it was just Krolia, and the Blade, and an endless war. Mistakes would cost her a life, but it was always her own.

She looks across the campfire, tucked deep inside the damp cave carved into the flesh of the space whale’s back, and sees Keith,  _ her _ Keith, staring back, the weight of her question lingering in his eyes.

But she never had just one life to spare. One life to guard. And when the reality sinks in that she’s nearly failed that, too, it’s not as funny as before.

“My what?” Keith murmurs, blinking.

“You heard me,” Krolia shrugs, setting aside the leaf full of charred meat that had been her dinner and leaning over her crossed legs. “Tell me about your life.”

Keith looks away. “You’ve probably seen it all from the quantum rift. What more is there to say?”

Krolia holds her stare level with Keith’s, even when he turns away and runs a hand down the back of his neck. “I’d like to hear it in your own words,” she says.  _ Tell me it’s not a lie. _

There’s a moment of panic, a flash of white in the corners of his eyes, but Keith stamps it down, and it’s gone as soon as it had arrived. “Okay,” he says. He sits up straighter, presses the full length of his back into the wall. “Where do you want to start?”

Krolia looks down at her lap. “How about school?” she asks. “Your father always dreamed of sending you to the Garrison Academy. Never stopped talking about it.” 

She looks up in time to see Keith’s smile, soft and melancholic, weaving at the corners of his lips. “Yeah,” Keith says. “I managed to get in.” The smile grew tighter. “Somehow.”

“I can see why,” Krolia says. “You have a lot of your father’s determination in you.”

Keith takes a deep breath. “Yeah,” he repeats softly.

The rain outside comes down a little harder, wind catching the blades of fire underneath their cooking pot and sending light deeper into the recesses of their cave. The wolf creature at Keith’s side shifts in its sleep, and he moves his hand to rub at its ears without looking. 

They’re silent for a while, Keith watching the rain with his head resting in the slot between his knees. Krolia watches him instead, watches his fingertips run patterns through the dog’s fur. There’s a feeling of contentedness in the fact that she’s certain Keith can tell her eyes are on him.

Flickers of her son’s past dance across her mind from time to time, segments of the complete, whole,  _ lonely _ life she had missed. Guilt, if she could call it that, gnaws a hole in her heart, and she swallows away the choked feeling that builds up there until her mouth can move again.

“So what else did you do?” she asks. The hand stopped.

“What do you mean?”

She already knows the answer to the question, but she asks it anyway.  _ You had someone. _ “Any friends? Hobbies?”

Keith folds his arms around his legs, stays silent for a heartbeat. “Yeah,” he says. “A few.”

“Hobbies, or friends?”

Keith shrugs. More silence.

She’s seen his face. Seen the image burned into Keith’s memory, the man that haunts his past in all the right ways. She’s seen it draped down the sides of buildings on rebel planets, and plastered across wanted posters deep within the Galran Empire. But despite all that publicity, despite all the fame, Krolia knows nothing about the man that means everything to her son.

“You know,” Krolia begins, leaning her head back against the cave wall, “I never met any other humans besides your father.”

Keith lifts his head, blinks. “Really?” he asks.

“Well, not until you came around, I guess,” she says. “This time, I mean.”

Keith purses his mouth just a little, presses it into a line. There’s resentment there - but it’s the personal kind. The selfish kind. The kind that seeds guilt and leaves hearts shredded. Krolia’s soul falls when she sees it, because it’s her.

“I know I wasn’t around,” she says, voice barely cutting over the hiss of the rain. 

“You were doing what you had to do.”

Krolia shakes her head. “It doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry for it. Because I am, Keith. I really am.”

Keith sighs, straightens back up again with a quiet groan. The dog’s ears perk up, and it turns to look at him, then to Krolia. Keith starts to pet it again. “You don’t need to be.”

“No, I don’t,” Krolia says. Keith frowns, but she holds up a hand to cut him off before he can open his mouth. “Because I know you had someone who was better than I ever could have been.”

Keith narrows his eyes. “Dad died pretty early on.”

“I’m not talking about your father.”

There’s a sharp silence. The sizzle of the rain on the ground outside dulls, and the sound of the crackling fire between them echoes against the walls of their cave.

Keith’s staring at her, eyes wide. “What?” he asks.

“We’ve been seeing flickers of each other’s pasts for the last three weeks, Keith.” She smiles at him, but it’s small and guilty. “I keep seeing him. And you haven’t mentioned him yet. Not once.”

Keith lets a sharp breath past his lips, pulls his legs down and watches her. He doesn’t make an effort to speak, so Krolia continues.

“I haven’t met any other humans,” she says again, tilting her head. “And certainly not any other human men.” She leans forward, fixes her son with a glare she hopes is motivational. “But I know the look they give you when they love you.”

Keith jumps.

“And it’s not like you’re not obvious about it yourself,” she continues, raising an eyebrow. “You get your transparency from me. I can take credit for that, at least.”

Keith’s eyes dart everywhere, from the wall of the cave to the campfire to the dog to  _ anywhere  _ that wasn’t her. He licks his lips, shakes his head, lets out a sharp laugh.

“No,” Keith says, shaking his head. “No, it’s not like that.”

Krolia smirks. “Yeah?” she says. “What makes you so sure?”

“He doesn’t…” he cuts himself off, slams his eyes shut, and grunts out a confused noise. “He doesn’t think of me like that. I know him, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t think of me like that.”

Krolia looks back down at her lap. “Sometimes,” she murmurs, “it’s the people we think we know the best that we end up knowing the least.”

When her eyes meet Keith’s again, it’s not embarrassment, or fear, or anger that’s there like she expects. It’s surprise. He tries, opens his mouth to start to speak, but nothing comes. Krolia smiles again, shakes her head, holds up a hand.

“Just promise me,” Krolia says, “that when the time is right, you’ll tell him.”

The rain starts again and she lets it drop, lets Keith fall asleep against the dog and the wall and the comfort of the fire. There’s something in his posture, though, that bleeds confidence, and Krolia watches him rest with a quiet smile on her lips.

She falls asleep, too, thinking of a man she met in the desert all those years ago. She can see his smile, can feel his warmth, and part of her - the guilty, selfish part of her that realizes she only ever kept those feelings to herself - hopes that Keith can feel it, too.

**Author's Note:**

> I really, really love Krolia, okay? I NEED to know what they did while they were together. Keith got two full years of uninterrupted access to his mother - nothing but time to talk and rant and cry and hug it out. Their relationship is so fascinating to me.
> 
> Unbetaed, because I am an impatient ninny. 
> 
> [**[Tumblr]**](http://endoplasmicpanda.tumblr.com)


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